Alex Hill

Post-Doctoral Researcher, School of Interactive Computing

Biography

Alex Hill is a postdoctoral fellow researching architectures for mobile augmented reality. He lead the research effort on the KHARMA architecture associated with the first version of the Argon iPhone client. He also lead development of the UART toolkit for the Unity 3D game engine, and the ClearSpace research project on collaborative work in virtual environments that leverages the Wonderland open source virtual world toolkit. He collaborated on outdoor augmented reality projects in urban environments with the RNOC and IMAGINE labs.
Alex received his doctorate in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago where he worked in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, the birthplace of the CAVE virtual reality room and one of the longest running academic collaborations between computer scientists and art students. While at EVL, Alex worked on developing a framework for transitioning work environments between desktop and immersion called Withindows. He also taught a course on virtual reality and worked closely with MFA students in the School of Art and Design to develop electronic art pieces for the medium.
Alex recently worked as a research scientist at the Articulab that is part of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior founded by Justine Cassell. While at Northwestern, Alex worked on developing modular systems for realizing virtual peers based on the SmartBody architecture developed at USC. This work also involved developing extensions to the Behavior Markup Language recently put forward by Hannes Vilhjálmsson, Stephan Kopp and others in the field.